What Payless can teach you about branding
Influencing people into paying $600+ for their $20 shoes
Payless shoes is known for its discount prices, and because of that, people think the quality is worse than it really is.
So in twenty-eighteen, they changed one of their stores and rebranded themselves as an Italian designer shoe called Palessi.
Which they named after renowned Italian designer Bruno Palessi.
But Bruno doesn’t exist.
It was all a fabricated experiment to show that people pay top dollar for a label, not for the quality itself.
It worked so well that the same shoes they sold for $20 were now being sold for up to $600 and people were happily paying for them.
Here’s two things you can learn from this genius marketing stunt:
Positioning matters
With a name like Payless, you already know they’re about discount shoes.
Nothing more you really need to know.
But with Palessi, they built up a back story with a renowned Italian designer. Even though he doesn’t exist, the allure of the story got people excited.
It’s the back story coupled with the high price that made people feel the design was such high quality, even though they most likely wouldn’t even consider buying the same shoe from Payless.
“Palessi is just such high quality, high fashion, taking your shoe game up to the next level,” said one man wearing spiked necklaces, holding a knee-high boot. “It looks really well made.”
People buy status
People want to buy better versions of themselves.
So with fashion, they want something to make them go from ignored to receiving compliments.
Something to show off their wealth and feel like they’re living a luxurious lifestyle.
It’s not the quality of the material that’s going to sell. You can spend all day talking about features of your product and it won’t convince them to buy.
Matter of fact, the more you push and talk about how great your product is, the more desperate your brand comes off and people feel like you’re just trying to make a sale, which completely turns them away.
Instead of talking about your product, talk about how your product makes their life better, no matter how superficial the reason may be.
Remember, nobody cares about you, they only care what you can do for them.
So don’t be boring, pull off a marketing stunt that gets people talking about you after years of being ignored.